North America - California (Geographic Keyword)

1-25 (318 Records)

The National Register (NR) Criteria are supposed to assist in defining the significance of a cultural resource - bringing some order to chaos. But whose interpretation of significance? Were the criteria based on the agreement of culturally diverse individuals? Or the result of those that felt we needed to show some resources are better than others, using an objective checklist approach. Either it can answer "important" research questions or not. Either George Washington slept here or he...

Aerial photography with unmanned aerial systems (UASs), 3D modeling through photogrammetry, and the development of virtual reality environments are methods that are taking root within the discipline of archaeology. Developments in hardware and software over the past several years have led greater numbers of archaeologists to adopt these methods with more diverse applications. PaleoWest Archaeology, working under contract with our partners at PacArctic for Naval Facilities Engineering Command...

As part of the work undertaken as part of the rehabilitation of the historic Federal Office Building at 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, the US General Services Administration uncovered some of the remaining foundations for San Francisco’s old City Hall, which was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. These foundations represent the easternmost extent of the city hall, which had not been previously documented. Previous work on the rehabilitation project had turned up artifacts that...

Socio-political development in aboriginal California follows a trajectory quite different from that in much of western North America, culminating in very small socio-political units, in some places independent family groups approximating those characteristic of the Great Basin. The key development leading to this family-level organization was in both places the privatization of stored plant food, which incentivized the intensive use of plant foods (pinyon and acorn) that were abundant but costly...

Methodological advances are reshaping our understanding of island colonization. Refinements in dating methods, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and search techniques have resulted in discoveries that challenge outdated theories of islands as marginal to human migration, settlement, and subsistence. This is particularly true for research related to the initial peopling of the New World via a Pacific Coast route. Once considered irrelevant to the story of New World colonization, California’s...

This study examines human dietary responses to the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), an extended period of warmer and drier environmental conditions from AD 900-1300, in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Stable isotope and radiocarbon analyses of human remains attributable to the Tuolumne Me-Wuk reveal individual-level dietary behaviors. Results show a region-specific "Central Sierran" pattern of resource use in the form of a distinctive isotopic signature relative to other areas...

Recent theoretical over-emphasis on human agency and denial of the significance of socio-cultural structure presents a radical challenge to a century of research. It implies that Durkheim, Boas, Weber, etc., are irrelevant, and that long-standing structures of inequality (e.g., of gender or race) somehow do not exist or are not important. Examination of recent human-agency studies illustrates that, instead of studying human agency as action, interpretations are based on the kinds of structures...

Modeling of late Pleistocene and early Holocene coastal regions in the northern Channel Islands and globally has provided important foundations for understanding impacts of sea level rise on the archaeological record, near coastal communities and environments during the past 20,000 years. A complex, effective model of suitable coastal locations for human settlement and habitation takes into account myriad variables, including resources such as water and less-quantifiable, cultural causes. The...

Within its collection the Trinidad Museum has an artifact that consists of three individual wood pieces that are believed to be the remnants of the original wooden cross erected by the Spanish in 1775 on Trinidad head in northern California. The Trinidad Museum was uncertain as to the validity of this claim and so a thorough investigation of the artifact was undertaken to determine if in fact these wood pieces are indeed the remnants of the original Spanish wooden cross. A number of methods were...

The "archaic" abstract rock art style in the midst of the revered, fiercely defended cultural sanctuary of the Yuman-Hokan speaking tribes in the Mohave Valley along the lower Colorado River links culture with style, particularly when considering the absence of styles associated with linguistic family branches later expanding into surrounding areas. Further, that an archaic abstract style regionally associated with historic period Hokan speakers is also found throughout the Mojave Desert,...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data was collected from over 300 individuals to further understand the hypothesized spread of Penutian populations from the Columbian Plateau into Central California around 5,000 BP. While living and ethnographic Ohlone groups- specifically in the San Francisco Bay area- speak Penutian languages, it is unclear what effect immigrating Penutians speakers had on existing Hokan populations between 2500-3000 BP. Distinct maternal lineages that belong to either immigrating...

Far from providing a bounty that obviated agriculture, the California acorn economy presented risks of secular variation more extreme than experienced by other densely populated hunter gatherers. Decentralized political organization and high ethno-linguistic diversity further complicated redistribution of spatio-temporally variant resources. In the ethnographic period, shell bead money played a key role in enabling exchange. We examine changing patterns in bead manufacture and distribution...

Acorns were an essential foodstuff across prehistoric California; the transition to acorn use is currently being investigated. CA-SBA-53, a single-component Middle Holocene site on the mainland coast near Santa Barbara, contains an assemblage fairly evenly split between mortars and pestles, traditionally associated with acorn processing, and manos and metates, generally associated with seeds.; furthermore, these mortars and pestles are some of the oldest known in California. By extracting and...

I analyze more than 400 lithic artifacts associated with the development of intensive Chumash shell-drilling activities from four sites on Santa Cruz Island (SCRI), CA. By the second millennium CE, the Chumash of the northern Channel Islands had developed a specialized bead-making industry and a parallel industry of formal microdrills to perforate those beads (as documented by Arnold [1987]). During the latter part of the Middle Period (AD 900-1150), trapezoidal microdrills dominated; in the...

The Central Coast and San Francisco Bay regions of California are areas of high climatic, ecological, and indigenous cultural heterogeneity. During the last two decades, archaeobotanical research in these regions has begun to document the contributions of botanical resources in indigenous foodways systems through time. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a large number of anthropogenic shell mounds were population aggregation sites used for thousands of years, and, for the period after ca. 1050 CE,...

As many recent genetic and archaeological studies have shown, humans have intentionally and unintentionally moved plants and animals around the world. The California Channel Islands provide a unique environment to explore ancient translocations due to their close proximity to the California mainland, long human occupation (~13,000 years) and limited terrestrial diversity. Here we present our interdisciplinary approach to investigating the origins of California Channel Island terrestrial mammals...

Archaeological sites have traditionally been considered only as potentially eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion D (data potential) of the NRHP, but professionals in the field of Cultural Resources Management have begun to push for archaeological sites to be considered under Criteria A (significant events), B (significant people), and C (artistic value or method of construction) as well. Furthermore, archaeological sites are increasingly considered...

The Bay Area, and San Francisco in particular, is experiencing rapid gentrification due to the influx of highly-paid workers employed by the tech economy centered in Silicon Valley. As the cost of living increases, long-time residents are being actively pushed out, and various community organizations have sprung up in response to highlight and address these issues of gentrification, displacement, and homelessness. In this paper, I explore the process and results of partnering with community...

Archaeology provides an amazing vehicle for teaching the Common Core and engaging students in lessons across the curricula, while emphasizing teaching for deep understanding of big ideas or broad concepts. Social sciences, history, and science easily find avenues for collaboration, while students use language arts and math skills to analyze and apply data, as well as to write reports. Archaeological inquiry may be used to understand the human past, employing such tools as observation, inference,...

In this paper I will illustrate how my research praxis necessarily altered as a product of close collaboration and consultation. The Muwekma Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area (California, USA), is a community that has been eager to engage with respectful researchers in the analysis of their ancestors remains, once they have been disturbed. As a non-indigenous researcher collaborating with the tribal community, aspects of proper respect and care towards ancestors, and materials associated with...

Yosemite National Park (California) receives an overwhelming four million visitors per year. While most visitors remain in the developed areas of the park, many people venture forth into the 704,556-acre Wilderness areas for recreation and solitude - the sheer frequency of which leads to resource impacts unprecedented in many other Wildernesses. In response, park resource managers developed the “Wilderness Restoration Program” in 1987, a program designed to directly mitigate and alleviate the...

This paper examines the possibility of using the narrative form to expand the ways by which the archaeological record can be interpreted. Narrative archaeology has become a prominent mode of academic communication within the discipline. The acceptance of this stylistic format creates a space where narrations alienating effect can be used as a tool so to better understand the alienation colonial encounters produce in the past. This is not to say that all standard manner of archaeological...

In this paper, we examine the challenges associated with understanding indigenous community formation and change through the archaeology of the native ranchería at Mission Santa Clara de Asís. The mission’s indigenous population had well-documented and distinct temporal shifts, initially drawing local Ohlone converts but eventually extending recruitment to Yokuts groups in the more distant San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills. These population changes pose an intriguing archaeological...

Why does archaeology matter in the 21st century? One value is its ability to help us understand how humans react to changing circumstances, not with law-like statements but instead in terms of general behavioral patterns. The social context south-central California rock art, a record of visions or dreams, is an example of this fact. As partly indicated by rock art, the Medieval climatic anomaly led in one area to a population collapse but, in a related region, to population increase and the...